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The architecture, decoration, and furnishings of this room illustrate the transplantation of Germanic traditions in colonial America.

During the second quarter of the eighteenth century, large populations of German speaking immigrants from throughout northern and central Europe established agricultural communities in Pennsylvania. They brought with them a variety of domestic forms, designs, skills, and customs. Craftsmen imbued these traditions with new energy and influences, modifying them in each succeeding generation.

The interior woodwork of this Pennsylvania German kitchen was originally part of a two-story rubblestone house that was completed in 1752 for Georg Müller, a prosperous mill owner in Millbach, a small community in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. This traditional interior retains many features from Germanic house types. The massive molded beam construction, square newel post and stair balusters , and raised carved panels and shaped wrought-iron hinges on the doors all have precedents in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Germanic design.

Fitted with a large cooking hearth and furnished with work tables, rooms like this served as a center for a wide range of daily household activities.

Additional information:

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

The two-story stone house that originally contained this kitchen was the home of Georg Müller, a prosperous mill owner of Millbach, a small community in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. Müller was one of the large number of German immigrants who had arrived in Pennsylvania during the second quarter of the eighteenth century and built their houses with rooms such as this kitchen based on European models. The carved panels of the door with its shaped wrought iron hinges (along with the ten-foot-wide mantel carved from a solid piece of oak and the square newel post and balusters of the stair) have their design origins in the German-speaking areas of late seventeenth-century northern Europe. The room's furnishings of paneled chairs, glazed earthenware on sturdy tables, and wrought iron kitchen wares are typical of the Pennsylvania Germans' meticulous workmanship and attention to decorative detail, and express the love of beauty in everyday objects that these early immigrants brought from Europe. Martha C. Halpern, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 258.

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